Amazon S3 REST API Introduction

Welcome to the Amazon Simple Storage Service API Reference. This guide explains the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
application programming interface (API). It describes various API operations, related request and
response structures, and error codes. The current version of the Amazon S3 API is
2006-03-01.

Amazon S3 supports the REST API.

Note

Support for SOAP over HTTP is deprecated, but it is still available over HTTPS.
However, new Amazon S3 features will not be supported for SOAP. We recommend that
you use either the REST API or the AWS SDKs.

Read the following about authentication and access control before going to specific API
topics.

Requests to Amazon S3 can be authenticated or anonymous. Authenticated access requires
credentials that AWS can use to authenticate your requests. When making REST API calls
directly from your code, you create a signature using valid credentials and include the
signature in your request. For information about various authentication methods and
signature calculations, see Authenticating Requests (AWS Signature Version
4).

Making REST API calls directly from your code can be cumbersome. It requires you to write
the necessary code to calculate a valid signature to authenticate your requests. We recommend the
following alternatives instead:

Use the AWS SDKs to send your requests (see Sample Code and
Libraries). With this option, you don't need
to write code to calculate a signature for request authentication because the SDK
clients authenticate your requests by using access keys that you provide. Unless
you have a good reason not to, you should always use the AWS SDKs.

Use the AWS CLI to make Amazon S3 API calls. For information about setting up the AWS
CLI and example Amazon S3 commands see the following topics:

You can have valid credentials to authenticate your requests, but unless you have
permissions you cannot create or access Amazon S3 resources. For example, you must have
permissions to create an S3 bucket or get an object from your bucket. If you use root
credentials of your AWS account, you have all the permissions. However, using root
credentials is not recommended.
Instead,
we recommend that you create IAM users in your account and manage user permissions. For more information, see
Managing Access Permissions to Your Amazon S3 Resources in the Amazon Simple Storage Service Developer Guide.